Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Abortion Access Would Reduce Poverty Rate: Study

In an analysis of "unintended childbearing," Richard Reeves and Joanna Ventor of the Brookings Institution conclude that low income women would yield fewer live births if they properly used contraceptives and if abortion were made more freely available to them. They reported that while one-third of the unborn children of wealthy single women do not survive pregnancy, over 90% of poor single women's children survive to birth.

Poor women are five times as likely as affluent women to have an unintended birth, new research from the Brookings Institution shows — and that drives inequality.

The Brookings study examined fertility outcomes of 3,885 single women, none of whom were trying to get pregnant. Those with incomes below the poverty line were twice as likely to have sex without protection as those with incomes four times the poverty line, data from the National Survey of Family Growth showed.

Wealthier women who face unplanned pregnancies were also far more likely to have abortions.

Researchers reported a financial barrier to safe procedures is the primary deterrent. Equalizing abortion rates, they calculate, could reduce the unintended birth ratio by a third.

Using economic modeling, [Brookings] found that if poorer women had the same access to contraception as more well-off women, it would cut the birth rate for single women living in poverty in half. Doing the same for abortion would also have a dramatic impact, reducing the birth rate from 72 births per 1,000 women to 49. Of course, the real solution would be to make both contraception and abortion accessible to lower-income women, which would probably result in their unintended birth rate coming very close to what it is for higher-income women.

One of the peculiar facts the Brookings Institution pulls out is that the abortion rate is higher for the highest income bracket they looked at, which was 400 percent of the poverty rate. Single women who make $47,000 or more a year abort 32 percent of their pregnancies, whereas single women making $11,670 a year or less abort only 8.6 percent of their pregnancies. Women in the middle abort 11 percent of their pregnancies. That may seem hard to square with data from the Guttmacher Institute that shows that the majority of abortions are obtained by women living in or near poverty: Nearly 70 percent of abortions are for women who make 200 percent or less of the federal poverty line.

How can it be true that middle-class single women abort nearly one-third of their pregnancies, but lower-income women, who abort a smaller percentage of their pregnancies, still make up most of patients sitting in abortion clinic waiting rooms on any given day? The answer is simple: Lower-income single women get pregnant way more often. Way more often.

[Brookings] continued, “Control of fertility varies widely between income groups. Most unmarried women are sexually active, regardless of income. But women with higher incomes are much more successful at ensuring that sex does not lead to an accidental baby. This almost certainly reflects their brighter economic and labor market prospects: simply put, they have more to lose from an unintended birth.”

Bradley Mattes, the executive director of Life Issues Institute, commented on the data and said, “These census results clearly show that Planned Parenthood continues to pursue the eugenics philosophy of its founder, Margaret Sanger, who believed that Blacks and the poor were “unfit” to reproduce. She dedicated her life to controlling the population of these “undesirables” by advancing birth control and sterilization in their neighborhoods. Later, the legalization of abortion gave Planned Parenthood an effective and lucrative means for furthering this eugenics agenda. Although Planned Parenthood denies it, these maps [of abortion clinic locations] show conclusively that they continue to target minorities for abortion.”

Additionally, Margaret Sanger once said that women in poor areas of the world should have “no more babies.” And in September 2014, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sounded just like Sanger when she said, “It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people.” She also admitted that she backed Roe to eliminate “populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

I was surprised to see that one additional explanation was missing from the study: women’s beliefs and attitudes about abortion. Is it possible that poor women are more pro-life than their affluent peers, and that these beliefs also contribute to the differences in abortion rates?

There is some national survey data that suggests this might be the case. For example, one RAND report found that “The higher the education and income levels of a respondent, the more likely he or she is to support the liberal end of the abortion spectrum, and vice versa,” and a 2012 Gallup poll revealed the same trend applies to identifying as pro-choice. When asked if the government should fund abortion services for poor women, those in the lowest income bracket were no more supportive than other respondents, RAND found.

It’s possible that there is a greater stigma against unintentional childbearing for more affluent women, who are expected by their friends and family to finish college and find a stable job before having children. (A related stat is that 76 percent of adolescents with highly educated mothers indicate that they would be embarrassed by a teenage pregnancy, compared to 61 percent of adolescents with moderately educated mothers and 48 percent of adolescents with mothers who did not graduate from high school.)

Interestingly enough, the poor and working-class women I interviewed were less likely than their more privileged peers to bring up financial instability as a reason for abortion. This may be because it is the norm for them to see other women with few resources raising children and somehow getting by. . . .